Author 




THE 

VISION OF THE KINGDOM 



ANNUAL SERMON 

BEFORE THE AMERICAN BOARD 
OF COMMISSIONERS FOR 
FOREIGN MISSIONS 

BY THE REV. WILLARD G. SPERRY, D.D. 

PRESIDENT OF OLI\E'V 'COLLEGE - 



DELIVERED AT MANCHESTER, N. H. 
OCTOBER 13, 1903 




PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 

14 BEACON ST., BOSTON 
I903 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



" AND I SAW, AND BEHOLD, THE LAMB STANDING ON THE MOUNT ZION 
AND WITH HIM A HUNDRED AND FORTY AND FOUR THOUSAND, HAVING HIS 
NAME, AND THE NAME OF HIS FATHER, WRITTEN ON THEIR FOREHEADS." 

— The Revelation xiv : i 

The attentive reader who traces the course of Scrip- 
tural history from the pentecostal days of the Book of Acts 
down to the last of the epistles sees and feels a sobering 
change. The morning sky was bright, the midday was 
thickening and uncertain, the evening was full of threaten- 
ings and storm. Read the beginnings of this great story, 
when the church in Jerusalem won her first magnificent 
triumphs, and your heart is stirred by the reverberative 
sense of power and victory. Ponder the end of it, and 
you yield to the sadness of inevitable conflict yet to be 
prolonged, and of temporary defeat. The latest of the 
epistles are strange and dark ; their note is one of warning, 
not of victory. You hear not a paean but a miserere. The 
church is full of "fightings without and of fears within." 
Faith has declined. Some believers are turned aside after 
Satan. Love is replaced by selfish worldliness. " All seek 
their own, not the things that are Jesus Christ's." Truth 
has given place to " knowledge falsely so called." " Ungodly 
men turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness " are to 
be found in all the churches. These are the " hidden rocks 
in the love feast"; "clouds without water"; "autumn 
trees without fruit"; "wild waves of the sea foaming out 
their own shame"; "wandering stars to whom is reserved 
the blackness of darkness forever." Had the New Testa- 
ment closed with Jude's epistle, the curtain would have 



4 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



gone down upon a few souls contending earnestly for the 
faith which was once delivered to the saints, contending 
but not victorious, and we should have seen the background 
of the broad stage black with a multitude of mockers and 
complainers. Such were the trials which beset the church 
at the end of the first century. It was not the mind of 
the Spirit that the last chapters of the sacred record should 
end in such a mournful fashioning. We were not to be 
left in doubt concerning the final end of the gospel upon 
human society and human hearts. 

In the revelation we leave much of the story of the 
past behind us, and we turn to the vision of things yet to 
be. A door is opened in heaven, and in the light of that 
world we see that the constructive power of the gospel at 
last has had its way. The end is an individual life, exalted, 
inspired, perfected, precious ; and it is also a redeemed 
society, in whose choruses and ranks and companies the 
personal worth of each life is not lost but found, and is 
found to be a thing of indestructible worth and of worth 
beyond all price. 

" And I looked, and, lo, the Lamb stood on Mount Zion, 
and with him a hundred and forty and four thousand, having 
his name and his father's name written on their foreheads." 
I will not stop to ask, nor try to answer, critical or curious 
questions about this vision, and especially its relation to 
Jude's epistle, which I have just quoted, and which precedes 
it in our English Bible. Poor Jude's epistle, to be sure, 
has traveled far to find its resting place in the Word of 
God ; but it now rests, according to credible critics, some- 
where near the spot from which it started forth, and one 
may now affirm, if he chooses, that it was the mind of the 
Spirit to dispel the darkness of that epistle by the bright- 
ness of a word of prophecy, whereunto " ye do well that 
ye take heed as unto a lamp shining in a dark place." 
The Lamb stood on Mount Zion. He had climbed to the 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



5 



citadel of power. Great enterprises claimed his thought. 
Over his followers his empire was unlimited and supreme. 
There stood with him in a company of men exactly enumer- 
ated, no longer organizing but organized, separated from all 
others, controlled by a common principle and swayed by a 
common impulse, a hundred and forty and four thousand. 
A compact and unified army of the redeemed, and yet made 
up of those who wore each upon his forehead the shining, 
conspicuous symbol of individual and personal worth, " hav- 
ing his name and his Father's name" written, not on their 
banners, but on their foreheads. 

Does the vision of the hundred and forty and four 
thousand seem to you too limited and too little for the 
kingdom ? Are the numbers too exactly defined ? Be re- 
minded that the seer is not thinking of the size of the 
Redeemer's kingdom. For that purpose the revelation has 
another vision, so satisfying that we may ever be grateful 
for it. When the seer would picture for us the vastness 
of the kingdom, he calls it a multitude " which no man could 
number, of all nations and kindred and peoples and tongues." 
He reminds us that in the whole universe of God there are 
no alien or outcast races. But when the seer thinks of the 
great enterprises of the Redeemer's kingdom, requiring 
the services of an army disciplined and trained to entire 
obedience ; when he remembers that an army without 
limits exactly defined, is only a rabble, that it is a multi- 
tude incapable of military ardor, then his vision turns to the 
sharply defined " a hundred and forty and four thousand." 

The vision then invites us to think of a redeemed 
personal life and a redeemed society. It suggests that 

" The one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves " 

is the coming in of that state in which the preciousness 
of each separate life shall find its free expression in a 
perfected society. 



6 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



Let us say, then, that in this sacred company the ques- 
tion is not debated whether the individual exists for the 
sake of society, or whether society exists for the sake of 
the individual. Each is for the other. Their interests do 
not clash, and therefore the query does not arise. 

The vision by contrast with the persistent course of 
history reminds us how far the human race has wandered 
from the divine idea, and how imperfect have been the best 
attainments of the best social order in the world about us. 
Because men have failed to discern the true goal of life, 
of course they fail to reach the goal itself. How much of 
the story of the race, even in Christendom, is made up of a 
suppression of the individual and of the wild revolt of the 
individual against organized society. 

In the slow progress of the Christian centuries an idea 
has now and then seized upon men that society is not the 
cradle of the personal life, but the grave of personality ; 
a necessary antagonism has been assumed between the per- 
sonal life and the multitude ; it is an antagonism to be 
found everywhere in the heathen world, and all too com- 
monly in Christendom. If the end to be reached is a per- 
fected society the personal life must give way to it, just as 
the trees growing in forests must drop off their lower limbs. 
If the goal to be gained is a perfected personal life, then 
a man must abandon society and seek the cloister, just as 
the tree if it would round out its separate existence must 
grow alone. Such was the opinion of the early centuries. 
The note of alarm which was found in Jude's epistle became 
louder and stronger three centuries later. Fear then took 
possession of many serious minds throughout the length 
and breadth of Christendom. The world was then thought 
to be falling into hopeless corruption. Conquest over an 
evil world must be achieved by withdrawing from it. 
Hence the monastery, that child of the far East, grew up 
in the West. Great scholars, like Jerome, Ambrose, Augus- 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



7 



tine, became the zealous advocates of the monastery. Be 
it remembered that they were the wisest men of their day, 
though they had not grasped that larger conception of 
Christ's kingdom toward which our age is happily groping 
its way. They knew the preciousness of the human life, 
and they had some reason for thinking its worth was not 
likely to be realized in close contact with the society of 
their times. Now when such a view of life prevailed in 
Christendom no great world-conquering missionary enter- 
prise was possible. When men are bent on saving their 
own souls alive out of the world's wreck they will make no 
far-reaching effort for the world's redemption. The mis- 
sionary effort of such an age will be only fragmentary. It 
will fail to secure the largest result. On the other hand, 
the program of organized society has often been made on 
the theory that society herself is everything and the indi- 
vidual nothing. When this basis has been military the unit 
of value was the whole army, or the kingdom for which 
the army stood. Individual soldiers, companies, regiments, 
brigades, were of significance only as part of a larger host. 
No end was reached in their separate comfort or welfare. 
An Austrian statesman once tried to dissuade the first 
Napoleon from taking a certain action because a large loss 
of life would be entailed. " What difference do a hundred 
thousand men, dead or alive, make to me ? " said the great 
commander. To him the unit of value was the empire, and 
personal life was of little account. When society has been 
organized upon an ecclesiastical basis the individual has not 
fared much better. It has been true of some stately com- 
munions in the early centuries that they greatly obscured 
the worth of a personal life. They went far to convince 
the world that the church itself was everything and the 
individual nothing. 

In the civic life of our time there has been much to 
unreasonably exalt and magnify organized society at the ex- 



8 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



pense of the individual. Many of us remember that in the 
days of the Columbian Fair a great city of the West was 
pictured for us in the similitude of a regal woman, bearing 
upon her breast the words, "I will." It may be doubted 
whether the woman of the Apocalypse clothed with the sun, 
and the moon under her feet, so closely personified the 
Christian church as did that woman of the newspaper per- 
sonify the city. But to one who in a thoughtful way pur- 
sued an inquiry into the idea for which this queenly woman 
stood, she was seen to be at last the embodiment of civic 
pride, built up out of her mills and factories, ships and store- 
houses. And this pride was quite unrebuked by multitudi- 
nous crimes and wrongs which imperiled the lives of her 
citizens. The city was all in all, the citizen nothing. 

Enough has been said to give emphasis to the sentence 
with which we began, that in the varying course of the 
Christian centuries men have very commonly conceived 
the good of the individual to be at variance with the good 
of society. They have been unable to make real, often 
they could not imagine, a social life in which a man should 
come to know himself, his capacities, his duties ; a society 
so spontaneous, so free from dull formalities, and so full of 
divine impulse, that it could cultivate the life of the individ- 
ual, who of us has seen it ? Who yet dares dream of it ? 
No doubt one part of the unrest with which the twentieth 
century begins is the feeling that society, however organ- 
ized, fails to hold sacred and precious the life of the indi- 
vidual. A wise and thoughtful observer of human society 
has said, "The ancient society, the heathen society of 
today, whether in some savage island or in some fashion- 
able parlor, is ready always to sacrifice the personal nature, 
the individual soul; as if society itself were an object worth 
perfecting for its own value, it overwhelms individual char- 
acter and pitilessly sees lives lost in its great whirlpool." 
How great the need, then, of the mysterious prophecy and 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



9 



promise in the Apocalypse of a society whose glory shall 
be this, that individual life will not be lost in it, but will be 
found in it, and where what is essentially precious in every 
man's life will be increased by the touch of all other lives 
about it. 

If the church is to be an all-conquering missionary 
church she must shun some errors of the past. She must 
abandon the monastic idea. A cloistered virtue will not 
convert the world. Jesus prayed that his servants might 
not be taken out of the world. It was when they were in 
the world that they could best serve him. She must also 
reject the spirit of the Jesuit which glorified organization 
at the expense of the individual. She must believe that 
human society, under the lead of Christ, can somehow be 
reorganized so that it will exalt each separate life. Failing 
of this she cannot appeal with power to the sinful world, 
whether in Christendom or the region beyond. 

The vision of the Lamb upon Mount Zion, who has 
stamped his name and his father's name upon the foreheads 
of those who follow him, suggests a society which really 
exalts the individual. Personal life is after all the ultimate 
and the greatest thing. It was true of Christ in the days 
of his flesh, and he is the same yesterday and today and 
forever, that he was full of reverence for each human soul. 
What he knew about God made all the fatherless children 
precious to him. What he knew about his own human life 
made the great epic of redemption reasonable to him for 
the sake of one human soul. He grasped the true meaning 
of existence for every child of God. He saw in all of them, 
not mere mediocrities, with no power of growth, but he saw 
them ready to take their place amidst dominions and prin- 
cipalities and powers. One part of his great mission to the 
world was to awaken men to the greatness of their origin 
and to the glory of their destiny. How lofty was his cour- 
tesy, how tender his compassion, because he recognized the 
value of a human soul. 



IO 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



Now Christ's thought of men becomes at last, in that 
upper world, their thought of themselves. They look back 
with amazement, we may suppose, upon a time when life 
seemed a dull and trivial thing ; when they set a low value 
on themselves ; when they led a life of selfish expediency 
in the midst of a society which had no spontaneous power ; 
when they were without resources from whence they could 
draw newness of life. Entered now upon a better state of 
being, with the full consciousness of immortality burning in 
their breasts, rescued from every taint of evil, beginning 
to know themselves, vitalized in every power of their being, 
living in conscious freedom, thought, feeling, will, imagina- 
tion, memory, conscience, caught up into the full tide of 
his life so divinely great, they know at last what that life 
is which he came to give, and how surely he is able to give 
it more abundantly. 

No doubt the earliest era in missionary enterprise was 
more personal and more evangelistic than are the missionary 
labors of the present time. The earliest method was simple 
and personal. The purpose was to deliver and exalt the 
personal life. A high sense of the value of the soul made 
the early church forget that man was made for society, and 
that only in society can he realize himself. We have been 
told that Mr. Gladstone was once seen in a neglected street 
in London, kneeling beside a sinful woman whom he was 
seeking to bring to Christ. That act was a Christian indi- 
vidualism. But I suppose the great statesman would have 
been quick to tell us that his personal dealing with this one 
needy woman was not more Christian than many an attempt 
which he made to array the powers of organized society 
against some prevalent evil. That was also a great mis- 
sionary service which Gladstone paid to Christ when he 
consented to summon arbitration to take the place of war 
in the settlement of our Alabama claims. It is to this wider 
service that Christ summons us in these last times. The 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



1 1 



sociological era in the world's missionary life has dawned. 
It came as the seasons come, by processes far beyond our 
control. Civilization overspreads the earth, and with it 
come all the new opportunities and new duties. We need 
not fear that the call to wider duties will slacken or cause 
to stagnate the ongoing stream of Christian history. Let 
all institutional helps be summoned to our aid. Let medical 
science become tributary to Christ. The Christian phy- 
sician, building the hospital and dispensary, will open to 
the evangelist many a door otherwise fast closed. Let 
the light of better Christian learning irradiate the world. 
Schools, colleges, seminaries will widen and prolong the 
blessings of the kingdom, and nothing in this better social 
order, with its vast and varied labors, will lead us to forget 
that Christ came first of all to a needy one, nor lessen our 
sense of the value of the human soul for which he lived 
and died. 

The vision of the hundred and forty and four thousand 
suggests that the individual is to find the fullness of his 
life in a society made perfect by the controlling authority 
of Christ. There are little companies of men on earth, 
bound together by some common enthusiasm, who dis- 
cover that they can realize their own highest life only as 
they enter into the life of others. The oratorio class is 
such a company. Place it under the absolute control of a 
competent leader, let personal opinion and preference be 
put aside, let such a class take up its theme in accordance 
with the will of one controlling mind, and you see an organ- 
ized society where every singer will find his life multiplied 
in the powers and enthusiasms of those about him. When 
this missionary Board met at Oberlin last year we listened 
to such a society. Who of us that heard it can ever forget 
the singers and the song ? As they sang with mind and 
heart attuned to one noble theme they symbolized for us 
Christ's kingdom when he climbs to the place of absolute 



12 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



and undisputed leadership. Do you remember the theme ? 
They did not sing the praises of a triumph democracy, 
though that is a great theme. You would not have caught 
the spirit of their song had you framed a eulogy in praise 
of the republic of God on earth, though that theme is large 
and inviting. No, they sung " King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords." By comparison and contrast there is no other 
theme. 

This missionary Board must needs hear that surpassing 
song again and yield to the power of that ennobling theme. 
Our personal freedom is ours only as we are free to do the 
will of the great Commander. We need hear again the 
words which Horace Bushnell voiced for the world long ago : 
" Say what we will of our own personal, free arbitrament, 
the grandest things that ever come into us are commanded 
in. We even get more volume by what is commanded us 
than by all that we do. And so when the soldiers of Christ 
throng in after the great campaign is over, what will be 
more surely discovered in them than their everlasting en- 
noblement in Christ's great will and commandment ? And 
yet not that so much by what he commands as by the rever- 
berative sense of being under a command so high." 

We face now all the successes and the perils and dis- 
tresses of strange social conditions in the Christian world 
and in the heathen world beyond. This twentieth century 
which has made infinite progress along some lines seems 
sometimes far too much like the first Christian century. 
At any rate it has its own tremendous problems which, if 
we are to judge, should have been left behind us centuries 
ago. There are some aspects of Christian society which 
Jude's epistle seems still to describe. Of course history 
has its glorious things to tell us, and we need all the best 
impulses which may come to us from the best Christian 
society of our own times and of all times. 

But far, far beyond the present facts of history there 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



l 3 



remains for us the vision. Let prophecy sketch for us in 
barest outline only that kingdom of which history has seen 
only the beginnings, and our souls will yield to the persua- 
sion that Christ exalted to the citadel of power, calling 
about him his hundred and forty and four thousand, will 
lead them on to the joy of victory. This vision then should 
bring enthusiasm into every form of missionary labor. It 
should inspire the evangelist as he seeks to save the per- 
sonal soul. The same vision will animate the reformer of 
social life as he fashions his institutions into a perfect soci- 
ety, and both of them will cooperate to hasten the coming 
of that social order in which a man, redeemed from all evil, 
will find the fullness of his life in the life of the redeemed 
society about him. 

It is certainly true that in the providence of God the 
opportunities for personal ministries to individual souls are 
not to be fewer or less important than they have been in 
former days. They do not wane ; they never will ; but all 
the opportunities for the working out of a wise Christian 
socialism widen before us in bewildering profusion. They 
give added reason to hope that a nation may be born in 
a day ; that what was impossible today may be gloriously 
realized tomorrow. We are to remember also that not 
many centuries ago the foreign missionary came to us. He 
came bringing not merely the formal offering of forgiveness 
and grace in Jesus Christ, but he came bringing also many 
of the necessary arts and appliances of Christian life. " Let 
us feel," said President Woolsey, "that the little we know 
has for the most part come to us second hand. We have 
dressed ourselves by the help of the wardrobe of the past. 
We should have been as naked as savages had not the re- 
formers and men of God met us on our way to clothe us in 
all the garments of the Christian civilization. Having been 
thus ' clothed upon ' and being grateful for what we have 
freely received we must freely give." 



i 4 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



"And I saw." The seer whose words have been be- 
fore us was not one accustomed to look upon the outward 
forms of things. He saw the inner realities. This hundred 
and forty and four thousand were not mere outward forms 
to him. He could enter into the thoughts and feelings of 
every one. He felt the thrill of the personal life of each 
one, the kindling enthusiasm, the high resolve, the touch of 
each soldier's life upon the life of every other one. The 
value of the vision was not to him in the review of the 
forms of things. He saw the purposes of Christ and of all 
those who follow him. He appreciated intensely this sol- 
dierly relation to Christ. They were now walking along 
a road where he himself had walked before them ; therefore 
the vision was a reality. 

It is this vision that the world still needs. A fine 
idealism is behind the true missionary. He looks with un- 
veiled eyes upon the inner reality of things. The heathen 
world in its cruelty, in its hopeless estate, in its little and 
limited life, in the narrowness of its outlook, in the degra- 
dation of woman, in all its hopeless slavery and superstitions 
— God gives to his chosen ones a revelation concerning 
these things. They see also the enrichment of personal 
lives when they are redeemed from sin and death and are 
brought into the life of Christ. 

It is that this open vision may come to us that we con- 
vene tonight. Lacking this vision we must lose interest in 
the forms of things. Where there is no open vision the 
people perish. It is not sufficient for this occasion to know 
that the Lord's great missionary servants of every age have 
been men of vision. It is true that they faced the reality 
of things. They saw what a man is as he wanders far from 
God. They were able to see his life as it will be when 
Christ has wrought out his great work of grace and truth. 
They were not dismayed by appearances. Looking upon 
the outward forms of things they saw heathenism intrenched 



The Vision of the Kingdom 



and immovable around them. They saw themselves cut off 
from home and friends. They were to lead isolated and 
lonely lives ; far from the beaten paths of men they were to 
take their way. These adventurous servants of Christ, 
against every obstacle, kept heart and hope because a 
vision of things not seen as yet was always shining before 
their eyes. If God spreads out anew this vision in the 
hearts of his children as we come to this place, far-reaching 
blessings stretching to remotest mission fields will come to 
us. May God open our eyes to see his will. May he teach 
us that the genius of the religion of Christ requires men to 
turn to God one by one. If, then, afterward, we find a 
large place for Christian socialism, and we learn that all 
things are unchristian which are unsocial, may we be re- 
minded that better institutions and forms of social life will 
not redeem the world, and in the wider views of evangelism 
which belongs to these last days may we recognize the 
workings of that "one and the selfsame spirit, dividing to 
every man severally as he will." 



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